I guess maybe I'm just war weary, but again we have a Republican candidate for President telling us we need even more military spending. All the memes out there tell me that we spend more than the next 10 nations combine on our military and 8 of those are our allies. The internet also tells me we have the number 1 (air force), 2(navy) and 4(army) biggest airforces on the planet. If all that is true, when is it enough? Why do we need to spend even more? When will we start spending our money at home fixing our roads and bridges, our schools and so on?

I'm tired of war. I'm tired of our militaristic society where everything is violence and death. I think it's time to stop and to cut spending drastically.

So couldn't the government hire these trained laborers and engineers to fix roads, bridges, rail and other general infrastructure? Those secondary jobs would be spread more evenly throughout the country.

I guess they could. Though there is probably something to be said for job satisfaction. As an engineer, if you asked me to shift from designing jet engines to designing a highway overpass, I probably would not be too enthused about that. Same goes for a blue collar worker used to riveting airplane wings in a climate controlled shop, then asking him to start standing behind an asphalt paver in 100 degree heat.

I'm not saying that it isn't something that we should do, but those guys vote--and are probably going to vote for a candidate that provides more of the same, if they like their current job/situation.

Also I think we all like the thought of infrastructure spending. At the same time, how freaking horribly managed are most federal highway projects? Giant clusterfudges of inefficiency and frustration.

Except those secondary jobs as an engineer fixing roads and bridges don't pay dick compared to engineering jobs as a government defense contractor. High paying engineers love their money.

When I say "secondary" I was referring more to the money that flows in to an area as part of government spending. A restaurant or grocery store that sees it's business expand when there's more people in a community working. edit - administrative staff and HR in companies with that new staff. People that are directly working on those defense contracts but see benefits of the federal money flowing in.

The US government could hire those people at the same rate, probably even 10-25% more, they were making at Lockheed and save money.

A few guys in Michigan get food stamps they don't need and everyone loses their minds. The Pentagon wastes $25 billion and no one bats an eye.

If they just eliminated the waste we could cut the military budget significantly without sacrificing anything in terms of actual defenses. It's probably the most wasteful area of government and it's not even close. And we're not even talking about the uneeded Iraq War - we're talking about the waste and corruption that happened while executing and cleaning up the aftermath of the unneeded war. The DoD's books are so messed up we can't even audit them! This scandal should be on par with the financial crisis. It sure flies under the radar for being such a gigantic mess.

The U.S. military is good at fighting wars, but it sucks at managing money. Partly because of its convoluted bookkeeping systems, $8.5 trillion—yes, trillion—taxpayer dollars doled out by Congress since 1996 has never been accounted for.

That was also the first year that Congress passed a law requiring the Defense Department to be audited, which it has failed to do. In 2009, Congress passed another law requiring the DOD to be audit-ready by 2017. After spending—no wasting—billions on failed accounting software, the department is likely to miss that deadline, too.

So how does the military handle their books for the U.S. Treasury department? They cheat.

A scathing investigative report by Reuters in November 2013 described how an accountant at DOD in Cleveland would face the same monthly problem: Missing numbers, wrong numbers -- numbers with no explanation of where they came from or what they were for. To rectify the problem, the accountant was instructed to “plug” in false numbers in the DOD’s books.

Just because the $8.5 trillion is unaccounted for doesn't necessarily mean it was all wasted, but if their books are this bad you can guarantee there is lots of waste going on. This is the "related article" to the one above, from 2013:

Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense's accounts.

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon's main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy's books with the U.S. Treasury's - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. "A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate," Woodford says. "We didn't have the detail … for a lot of it."

The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford says, staff were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take "unsubstantiated change actions" - in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called "plugs," to make the Navy's totals match the Treasury's.